


Labyrinth

by DuskDragon39



Category: Metamorphoses - Ovid, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Doors (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Gratuitous quotes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I still want to get canon-typical doors canonized, Minor bits of body horror, Some poking at the idea of Smirke's 14, headcanon dump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DuskDragon39/pseuds/DuskDragon39
Summary: Maybe it begins here:Vague windings, a single pathway in and out, and not a chance that any save the inventor himself could ever retrace their steps. And now, finally, it was completed, a prison for a twice-formed monster.The Distortion, throughout the ages.
Relationships: Gertrude Robinson & Michael Shelley
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	Labyrinth

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this also contains a good deal of canon-typical spiral mind-fuckery, Theseus getting beaten up, forty-two (mostly non-graphic) skeletons, various quotes from what I think is episode 102 of tma, people getting eaten by a sentient hungry maze, and excessive headcanons. Also something that might be construed as gaslighting, but I'm really not sure on that front.
> 
> Look, it's three am, I haven't edited this, I kind of want to punch Smirke in the face, and I promise it's not as crackish as I'm making it sound.
> 
> Latin translations and assorted nerdery can be found in the end notes.

_“...Vixque ipse reverti_

_Ad limen potuit: tanta est fallacia tecti.”_

_\- P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses; 8.168-8.169_

* * *

Maybe it starts here:

The inventor trails his hand along the walls of the passage, easily following their twists and turns around the massive edifice. He’s been constructing this for years, now. Numberless winding passages turning back on one another, looping in senseless configurations and opening back in on one another. At the center of the spiraling labyrinth, a single room, fit for a king. 

It is exactly as was commissioned. 

A smile tugs at his lips as he wanders one last time through the halls. He had done well, hadn’t he? Vague windings, a single pathway in and out, and not a chance that any save himself could ever retrace their steps. And now, finally, it was completed, his prison for a twice-formed monster. 

Daedalus sighs as he turns the final corner. He’d be glad to leave this place, finally. It was magnificent, yes. A testament to his skill. Even he had found himself missing the sky after a while, though. He glances up at the heavy wooden door. Or rather, at where the door _should_ be. 

He frowns, and raises his head fully. A blank wall looms at the end of the corridor, where he’d been expecting the massive contraption of locks, bars, and entire tree branches. _It isn’t there._

Quickly, he flicks back through his route. He’d come from the center- and this was the final turn. He should be out. 

He should be _out._

The walls close in around him, and for a moment Daedalus just stays there, his breathing coming faster and faster. He’s not scared. He’s _not._ He knows this place. He knows it like the back of his hand. Better than the back of his hand. 

Daedalus turns and begins to retrace his steps. 

It’ll be another day before he throws open the heavy door and stumbles out, gasping. He lays there for a few minutes, staring up at the night sky and cursing the day Pasiphae had come to him for help. 

* * *

Two times, the Labyrinth ate the children of Athens. They wandered Daedalus’ paths, knowing that they were about to die. They feared the monster of the labyrinthic passages. They feared the passages themselves, the twists and turns that seemed to distort before their eyes and bring them to the heels of their death. 

They feared. 

It’s hard to overestimate the power that that has. 

* * *

When the third sacrifice had come around, Theseus had gone with them, had sworn to slay the monster. For the killing of one, twenty-eight lives had been commanded. If he failed it would be forty-two. 

How could he have stayed behind? 

He looks at the ball of twine Ariadne has thrust towards him. She shifts back and forth, nervously, waiting for him to take it. Her face’s a bit red, he notices. 

“What..?” The question trails off into night. Ariadne’s blush becomes even more pronounced, and she drops the ball. He catches it, still looking at her in confusion. 

She tries to explain. 

He tries to understand. 

* * *

The Labyrinth doesn’t feel… right. The walls press in around them, and the passages seem to get narrower as Theseus leads the others through the twists and turns. The silence is complete: only soft footsteps break the unnatural chill, and the sound of their breathing seems almost muffled. 

Something is wrong. 

A guttural roar echoes through the corridors, and Theseus suppresses a flinch. A boy behind him stops in his tracks and starts to cry. Theseus turns to hiss at him. The girl next to him doesn’t look like she’s doing much better either. Theseus can’t see the rest of their faces, but he suspects they’d all have the same fear written across them. 

That’s… not great. 

He draws his sword, and, in a low voice, tells them, “I promise you we’ll make it out of this. I’m not letting this go on any longer.”

They look at him, and for a moment, it seems like his reminder’s helped. Then the boy starts crying again, and the girl blanches in fear. The others start to back away, stumbling over themselves in a rush to get away from him. 

“What-”

As the girl raises a shaking finger, a snort of warm, foul-smelling air blows across the back of his neck. 

Fuck. 

* * *

Theseus collapses to the floor, exhausted. A trickle of blood wanders down the edge of his face, and he rubs at it absent-mindedly. Not moving sounds like it’d be a very good idea. 

Especially since his chest is beginning to ache where the creature had punched him, and he’s pretty sure it’s not a _good_ thing that he can’t feel his arm. 

So yeah. Not moving. 

“Don’t you dare die on us now.” 

Theseus cracks open an eye, glaring at the girl standing over him. It’s the same one from earlier, he notices blearily. She looks annoyed for some reason. 

“Didn’t I just save you,” he asks. It comes out sounding only mildly petulant. 

He’s fine with that. 

Right now sleep sounds really, really, nice. 

The girl kneels down, gets one arm under his shoulders, and then gestures for someone else to come over. Between the two of them, Theseus is hauled to his feet again. He stands there for a minute, swaying. His shoulder hurts. 

The girl crosses her arms. “Do you have a way to get us out of here?” Apparently she’s gone through fear and come right back around to anger. 

Theseus blinks, tries to pull himself together, and reaches for the satchel hanging across his torso. He rummages for a moment and then pulls out the ball of twine. For some reason, the fingers on that hand feel thick and slow, and the ball falls, twine unspooling across the floor. It rolls to the end of the hallway, and then turns the corner and keeps rolling. 

He blinks. “Follow the twine?” he suggests. 

The girl shrugs. “Makes about as much sense as anything else has, recently.” 

They both look towards the end of the corridor. The ball’s nowhere in sight. 

“Well,” Theseus sighs, “Let’s go.” 

  
  


* * *

The tunnels feel even more claustrophobic somehow, without their monster. The silence is no longer expectant, merely dead. Water drips down every now and then from some river or another flowing far overhead. 

The ball of string turns left. Theseus goes to follow, and then pauses for a minute, looking back at fourteen expectant faces. 

“Isn’t this the fifth left turn we’ve seen?”

Shrugs. 

“Alright, then.” 

They keep walking. 

* * *

Maybe it starts there, with a monster that’s dead and a legend that’s very much alive. Stories are power, after all, and to name something is to give it life. 

This is the Labyrinth. 

And the Labyrinth always has a guardian. 

* * *

Time passes. Theseus becomes the king of Athens. Ariadne is abandoned. Daedalus loses his son to the ocean, and flies on wings of wax. 

The Labyrinth lies empty. 

Twenty years pass. Grass grows over its door, burying dank, twisting tunnels in sun-warmed earth. Within, nothing moves. The skeletons of twenty-eight Athenian children lie abandoned in the chambers so carefully designed by Daedalus. 

One evening, as the sun touches the horizon, a girl-become-woman arrives at that door. Her long brown hair has been neatly braided away from her face. Her clothes are simple, well worn and well made. She kneels in the grass, pulling away clumps of earth, grass, and wildflowers, kneeling back as her efforts reveal a half-rotted door buried in the hillside. 

She’s still not sure why she came back here again- she barely survived the first time. Maybe it’s madness. Maybe it’s something else. She just- needs to see. 

She’s here now, though, isn’t she? She might as well get on with it. 

The woman presses a hand to the door. It swings open silently, a testament to its engineer even after forty years, revealing the tunnels beyond. 

It’s dark. 

The woman stands up, brushes dirt from her palms, and, as the world turns fully into darkness, steps across the threshold. 

* * *

She’d dreamt about it. 

Maybe that’s what had drawn her here in the end: the dreams. Endless corridors, flickering with torchlight, a glint of steel from Theseus’s sword. Water dripping from the ceiling, tunnels that closed in on themselves and twisted without ever getting smaller. A place where you could turn left five times and end up going in a straight line. 

Her feet splash through a puddle somewhere beneath her. She could light a torch- she could, she’d brought the wood and the flint, and the walls were hard enough that she could strike a light- but it felt… like she shouldn’t, somehow. 

It isn’t any weirder than anything else to do with the Labyrinth, she figures. Might as well let it alone. 

Her fingers brush against a patch of moss, and she smiles. Even locked away, the Labyrinth still found a way to twist itself, to become. As her fingers leave the wall, a faint glow suffuses the tunnel. Where her fingers have passed, three streaks of moss glow with an eerie blue phosphorescence. As she watches, the blue glow spreads down the tunnel wall, across the sloping ceiling, and scatters down the hall. Patches of moss light up, leaving the ceiling dotted with swirls and moss-stars. At her feet, the moss begins to grow, unfurling stalks as high as the woman’s knee. Then- on and on, down the hall, stalk after stalk unfurling. 

Tiny, glowing spores begin to drift through the air, a rising cloud of fireflies. They swirl around the woman’s feet, touch her hair and face, and settle on her outstretched hands. 

It’s beautiful. 

The woman laughs there, deep in the tunnels, surrounded by plants that’ve never seen the sunlight, and, as though guided by some music only she can hear, she begins to dance. 

Eventually (and it’s impossible to say exactly when, cast away from light and time), the woman stumbles into the central chamber, still laughing and giddy. Her arms and clothes are dotted with tiny specks of glowing blue. She throws herself onto what’s left of the bed, pausing only to throw away a stray bone caught under her leg. 

She falls asleep there, surrounded by the bones of those who came before her. 

* * *

She is the first. 

The Labyrinth has a monster, they say. The Labyrinth is strange enough that even its creator cannot find his way out. The Labyrinth will eat you right up. 

All of these things are true. 

Stories have power, you see, and as the woman lingers in twisted corridors, she becomes. Her bones become hallways carved of stone, her mind the twisting patterns first carved decades ago. She is the Labyrinth, and the Labyrinth is her, and they are. 

Then another unlucky soul stumbles across a door in the field. The woman knows when he Enters, and she follows him, laughing as he tries to convince himself that there’s nothing watching him, that these tunnels are no longer haunted by a monster. She’s not there when he looks around- he has to be imagining things. 

But then there she is again, and he starts running, but she’s not there, so he’s being stupid-

Before long, he goes insane, relinquishing his mind to her and falling deeper into the Labyrinth. She is hungry, after all. So. So. Hungry. 

Because here’s the thing: stories are powerful. So is fear. And fear is so, so easy to create. 

Here’s the other thing:

She is the first.

She is not the last. 

* * *

The Labyrinth is not a static thing. It- and whoever is it- twists themselves. It’s monster changes for whoever is so unlucky as to be eaten. Its shape changes to suit itself. As people become it, find its heart and lay down within, it changes. They become and it becomes, and together they are one. It is one. 

It’s a crypt filled with bones, shelves stacked high and overflowing. Bone crunches underfoot, and - oh, sorry, was that a skull you just put your foot through?

Here, it is a forest. Tall, black trees block out all sunlight. A wolf prowls the forest floor, deceiving any who come near. Granny, you say, what big teeth you have. 

Another time, it’s a castle. The staircases make no sense, you say. Of course they don’t, it tells you. But they don’t make _sense_ -

Once, it is a twist of lighting. He looks up at you. But it makes no sense, he says. The equations- 

It is all of these and none of them at once, a series of locations tied together in nonsensical, non-euclidean geometries. 

It ignores the others, the ones not so easily, delightfully twisted. They’re no fun, after all. When it can, though- oh that’s _delicious_. 

It twists and becomes and grows past anything its inventor might have imagined and eventually-

* * *

Eventually it is Evan Clark, and he’s been dining in the back streets of London for… awhile. Not forever! He has a sense of imagination, too, and some of those twists were truly excellent. 

Time is hard when you don’t actually have a sense of time, yeah? But it’s rather amazing just how turned around those streets can get. Squiggly, twisting passages- Daedalus would have been proud. 

If he existed. 

Did he exist?

Does it even matter, really? 

No, and besides there’s someone knocking on a door and wouldn’t it be fun if it didn’t lead where they thought it should?

He’s not one of the edible ones, though, and so his door leads (boringly enough) to his flat. 

Evan pouts for awhile, but then something tugs on it. The Labyrinth pays attention. Evan opens another door in the wall. He’s _good_ at doors. 

“Hello!” he says. The inedible one is talking to another man (who looks like an absolute _prick,_ Evan thinks. Unfortunately he’s inedible too. Sadness.), and the first inedible one has just given the Labyrinth another name. 

Distortion, he’s called it. The Spiral.

Evan thinks he likes the name. It’s too broad of course, and entirely wrong, but what better to suit a Labyrinth? 

* * *

To name something is to have power over it. 

Smirke names and defines the categories, and they’re picked up. Used. Fourteen. No room to move or change, to become. 

It hates it. It hates it, _it hates it_ -

At some point it becomes Kristina. It also likes being Kristina. Being Kristina is… chaos. Colors and fractals spiraling in whirling patterns, falling, falling into chaos. 

It’s _fun_. 

But vertigo is not the domain of the spiral, they say, and Kristina pouts. She likes vertigo. It makes people do funny things. So ~~the Labryinth~~ the Distortion goes back to tunnels and corridors. 

People expect things from it now. And apparently, _vertigo_ is not something that’s _expected_. 

But then it finds The-Worker-In-Clay, and oh, oh it’s been _forever_ since it’s had a sculptor. A creator. An _inventor_ . So they find an island and start to build a proper labyrinth, one that will twist the entire world into becoming. The Distortion stretches and builds and fills the space sculpted for it, and it is so, so close to _becoming_. 

* * *

And then there’s Michael. 

Everything is becoming, and then there’s Michael. 

Michael opens the door. He trusts Gertrude Robinson, and he trusts that she trusts that he’s someone who can do this. 

He doesn’t know that he’s a sacrifice. Not yet. He will. 

So Michael opens the door. It’s a neat door, a new door, one that the Worker-In-Clay’s made especially for this moment. It’s yellow. Kristina likes yellow. 

As the sun slips beneath the horizon, Michael steps across the threshold and into light and spirals and fractals. Doors and stairs rise around him In his hands he holds a map, a thread tracing out a familiar path. 

Ariadne’s string, born into a different form at last. 

The corridors are so, so bright. Mirrors distort Michael’s reflection as he passes them, shatters them, walks through them. In one, he’s too tall, too large, too, too. His hands are heavy rocks, too large for his arms. 

It watches him as he passes. 

He gets two feet further down the hallway, then doubles back hauls back his arm, and punches the mirror. Glass shatters under his hand, ripping through his skin as it flies outwards. Blood drips to the floor, sizzling where it lands. 

His reflection laughs. 

Michael screams, takes two steps back, and starts to run. 

He tears through the fractaling corridors, barely remembering to glance down at the map. He skids around another corner, and then-

A final door. Huge, made of old, rotting wood and barred three times. Entire tree branches were incorporated into its mass at some point, and dirt spills out around its base. 

The map points to whatever’s beyond it. 

Michael reaches out carefully, his fingers barely brushing the old wood. The door swings open on silent hinges, beckoning him into the darkness beyond. 

Michael gulps, and then enters the Distortion’s heart. 

* * *

Michael knows the Distortion as a series of corridors, yellow walls and never-ending spirals. 

Michael knows the Distortion as one thing, and one thing only, and that would be so bad, except the Distortion is Michael. 

He’d walked into a contorted, impossible edifice, invention built on distorted invention, and found the heart of what consumed him. He lashed himself to a twisting spiral, an eye tearing Kristina from her place in the heart. Forty skeletons greeted him. Around him the edifice collapsed into clay and sand, dissolving until there was only a single yellow door. 

Gertrude waited there for him, surrounded by collapsing clay and falling snow. She even still wore his coat. And when the door opened and Michael stepped out, she knew that it was no longer Michael. Not quite. Not fully. But also-

He’s not as far gone as he might have been, unsuited to the spiral as he was. She knows him, now. Perhaps more importantly, she _can_ know him. And the thing called the Distortion does not take kindly to being known. 

So no. It is Michael. It was not always Michael. It does not want to be Michael. 

But now it is. 

* * *

It’s limited, like this. It cannot flow and change like it used to, cannot become a lightning bolt or a forest or a castle or a crypt. Michael knows it as corridors, as doors and mirrors, and so that’s all that it is. It cannot shift, it cannot change. 

It doesn’t like it. 

It doesn’t like it. 

_It doesn’t like it-_

It is meant to twist and to become, to create vague windings and innumerable paths of different sorts. Madness is not the same for every person, and yet here it is, bound to a shell of a man sacrificed by someone who lied to him with every step of the way. 

It’s galling, is what it is. 

So when it finds Helen Richardson, her mind already twisting into gorgeous fractals, it’s not a hard decision to let her find the heart, to show her forty-one skeletons in a twisted shell of a room. 

* * *

Maybe it ends ~~starts~~ here:

“Er, it’s…” the Archivist trails off.

“What?” Michael asks. 

“It’s locked,” the Archivist says. 

“It’s not,” Michael giggles.

The Archivist frowns. “Why is it locked?”

A shudder runs through Michael, from the locks of hair that refuse to follow the laws of physics to the tips of his rock-heavy fingers. “It can’t be,” he says. 

The Archivist steps back and gestures at the door. “Well, you try it then.”

Michael tries. Michael tries, and then he knows, the way he was never supposed to, and then the Distortion _becomes_ , lets itself be Not Michael, and it’s like casting off weighted chains and _flying_. 

Helen grins. “Do you want to come in?”

* * *

Maybe it ends here, with Helen becoming. The Distortion is not a labyrinth, and maybe it never was. It’s corridors and doors and mirrors (much classier now- Helen has good taste). It’s twisting deceit and distorted reflections, a little bit human but mostly not. 

Maybe it ends later, after the world _becomes_ , when everything is known and seen, and even Helen cannot avoid the watcher’s gaze. 

Daedalus could not find his way out of the Labyrinth so easily as the watcher might now. 

Can something become so much that it is no longer what it was?

Does it matter, in the end? 

Does it matter?

Does it?

Does- 

  
  


* * *

  
  


_“Non secus ac liquidis Phrygius Maeandrus in undis_

_ludit et ambiguo lapsu refluitque fluitque_

_occurrensque sibi venturas adspicit undas. . ._

_. . . incertas exercet aquas.”_

_\- P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses; 8.162-8.164, 8.166_

**Author's Note:**

> Latin (translations by Brookes More):
> 
> First quote:  
> "So Daedalus contrived innumerous paths,  
> and windings vague, so intricate that he,  
> the architect, hardly could retrace his steps."
> 
> End quote:  
> "So sports the clear Maeander, in the fields  
> of Phrygia winding doubtful; back and forth  
> it meets itself, until the wandering stream  
> fatigued, impedes its wearied waters' flow."
> 
> Both come from Ovid's story of the Minotaur. 
> 
> Other things:  
> It's too late to discuss my feeling on Smirke, especially when a lot of it's in the fic. Please ask if you do want to hear said opinions, however, because I have them.  
> A good deal of the general philosophy behind this came from a conversation I had in the wake of Mag 136.  
> For right now I will content myself with saying that the man the Distortion thinks looks like a prick is _definitely_ Elias, because I have to have at least one dig at the man per fic.  
> This was also definitely not written as part of my effort to get canon-typical doors canonized.


End file.
